We're usually a modest bunch, but we we couldn't help but let you know about some honors and awards bestowed on Googlers recently:

Ramakrishnan Srikant is the winner of the 2006 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award for his work on pruning techniques for the discovery of association rules, and for developing new data mining approaches that respect the privacy of people in the data base.

Henry Rowley and Shumeet Baluja, along with CMU professor Takeo Kanade, received the Longuet-Higgins prize for "a contribution which has stood the test of time," namely their 1996 paper Neural Network based face detection. The award was given at the 2006 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference.

Team Smartass, consisting of Christopher Hendrie, Derek Kisman, Ambrose Feinstein and Daniel Wright won first place in the ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming) programming contest, using a combination of C++, Haskell and 2D. Third place went to Can't Spell Awesome without ASM, a team consisting of Google engineer Jon Dethridge, former Google interns Ralph Furmaniak and Tomasz Czajka, and Reid Barton of Harvard. They got the judges at the functional programming conference to admit "Assembler is not too shabby."

Peter Norvig was named a Berkeley Distinguished Alumni in Computer Science, and gave the keynote commencement address. We'd also like to congratulate Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo Research, who was a co-recipient of this award.